Chapter 9

The morning she left for Texas, Efraín walked her to the bus depot rather than let her take a cab, carrying her single suitcase himself though she’d told him twice she was capable of carrying it herself.

“You don’t have to prove that to me,” he said, when she reached for it a third time. “I know exactly what you’re capable of carrying. Let me do this one thing.”

The depot was crowded with early commuters and a handful of other young people bound for one training pipeline or another, easy enough to spot by the mix of nerves and forced casualness they all seemed to be wearing like a uniform they hadn’t been issued yet. Efraín set the suitcase down at her feet and stood there a moment, hands empty, looking like a man who’d run out of useful things to do with them.

“Fort Sam Houston,” he said, testing the name the way he tested most English words, carefully, as though it might correct him if he got it wrong. “This is Texas.”

“San Antonio. A training post for Army medicine. Officers, mostly.” She didn’t tell him the rest — the part where certain afternoons on that same post would not appear on any training schedule she’d ever be allowed to show him. That omission sat heavier in her chest than she expected, the first secret of many she now understood she’d be keeping from the one person she’d never kept anything from before.

“An officer.” Something moved through his face, pride threading through the same old grief that never fully left him where Consuelo was concerned, and something else besides — a kind of wonder, she thought, that neither of them had words for. “Your mother’s daughter, wearing rank.”

“My mother’s daughter, mostly wearing a nursing uniform. The rank is smaller than it sounds.”

“It is not smaller than it sounds.” He said it firmly enough that she didn’t argue. “You crossed two countries and buried nobody who mattered less than everything to do this. Wear it like it’s not small.”

The bus came before either of them had said everything there was to say, which she suspected was simply the nature of goodbyes worth having — never quite finished, never quite adequate to the thing they were meant to hold. She embraced him at the door, breathing in the smell of the liniment he still rubbed into his hands most nights, the same smell that had clung to him since the produce market job years earlier, and felt, for one unguarded moment, exactly as young as the seven-year-old who’d once cried in the grass above the coffee rows with an empty rifle in her lap.